By Miles: Fighting for Fairer Car Insurance Premiums During Lockdown
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Introduction
Fighting for Fairer Car Insurance Premiums
Pay-by-mile InsurTech disrupter By Miles has always believed there’s a fairer way for people to insure their car – one that is flexible and reflects the actual miles people drive.
PAN was tasked with boosting By Miles awareness in the UK market, and helping the industry and consumers understand the benefits of its model. As a totally new type of insurance – one where you only pay for what you drive – they needed to gain trust and SOV in the UK media to drive sales of policies.
We’d worked with PAN for a number of years to build up awareness of the By Miles brand, and to educate motorists and personal finance journalists about our pay-by-mile car insurance model, which is unique in the UK.
Quick strategic decisions and strong media connections from the team at PAN ensured cut-through during “unprecedented” times, and as households across the country searched for ways to save money, highlighted pay-by-mile as a fairer way to pay.
The Challenge
When the miles driven by British motorists fell by 80% during lockdown but insurance premiums stayed the same, we saw an opportunity to help drivers understand how unfair the traditional insurance industry is. And how much more sense paying by mile, with By Miles, makes.
The Solution
Our strategy was to use this moment to highlight an unfairness sitting right at the heart of the traditional car insurance system: if you drive less, you should pay less.
If your car is not on the road – you are less likely to get in an accident and need to make a claim. Yet, the way insurance currently works for the majority no UK drivers were seeing reduced premiums over lockdown despite their cars sitting idle on driveways.
So we set to work convincing influential media that this issue deserved airtime.
We crunched data to show that because of the reduced need for insurers to pay out during lockdown (less driving meant less accidents), insurers stood to make a whopping £1bn in profits.
We then called on insurers to offer refunds to customers who were no longer driving due to the government-mandated lockdown.
And we supported this with advice for drivers looking to get their premium costs reduced.
This allowed us to highlight By Miles as the obvious solution to this problem – flexible, fair insurance. One where you only pay for what you drive.
The campaign ran for three months, with the team briefing carefully chosen influencers, sharing hard-hitting data, and also providing lightning-quick comment to newsjack any mention of the issue by regulators or an incumbent car insurance provider.
The Impact
The By Miles brand makes sense.
Between April and June the programme delivered:
- 236 pieces of coverage, including exceeding targets by over 700%
- 17% increase in By Miles SOV
- Key message pull-through for ‘pay-by-mile’ increased 400% + Low Mileage Penalty put on the map
- Top VC touting By Miles as a top insurtech to watch in FT’s Sifted
- Total OTS: 660 million
Most importantly, this increased awareness has helped convince more people that the By Miles model makes sense. In January 2020, 59% of survey respondents agreed that if they drive less, they should pay less. Post-lockdown (July 2020) – and following our targeted campaign – this rose by six percentage points to 65%. That is equivalent to an increase of 2.5 million drivers who are now primed to purchase a By Miles policy.
And the icing on the cake was that three major insurers also announced their intention to refund motorists – meaning millions of motorists directly benefited too.
With a brief to promote the benefits of By Miles over traditional car insurance offerings, and to encourage switching, we set about helping drivers to understand why their standard policy isn’t working for them through a hard-working strategic media relations campaign.
